


Who Tells the Story

by Brachylagus_fandom



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Backstory, Gen, Hogwarts Founders Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brachylagus_fandom/pseuds/Brachylagus_fandom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Founder's story is long, as complicated and ugly as it can be funny and straightforward, nothing like what the "historians" have written down. For one thing, she and Rowena and all the others are in it, and everyone is wrapped in shades of gray.</p><p>The real story isn't as pretty and straightforward as the one that is slowly eroding it away, but Helga makes it a good one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Tells the Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Title is from Hamilton. I hope you enjoy!

Every year, there are children who come to her office during break or after classes, trimmed in green and red and blue and yellow. "Professor," they always begin, "tell us the story." If she asks which, they will look at her like she's an idiot. "Tell us the story of the Founders Four. Tell us how Hogwarts came to be."

By this point, she's outlived her husband, her friends, her children, their children, and a few of their children, too. She's even outlived the truth; to these children, the Hollow is a place and not a people. Godric has been canonized for all of history with Salazar as the villain. She and Rowena have been nearly written out of the narrative, like most of the people they fought with and fought for. So, she gets a house elf to fetch her a drink and tells them the story.

It's a long story, a complicated tale interwoven with so much context that these children don't quite understand and worn away by time and her failing memory. It's a sad story if she tells it all the way through. It's a horror story if some of the details don't get carefully cut away so that these children can be innocent for a bit longer. It's a love story if she tells it right because what Salazar and Isolde had was something no one else did and she can remember Godric's eyes lighting up every time he saw Agrona as if they had married yesterday. It's a good story if she starts at the beginning, one of true love, freedom, revenge, and friendship.

Normally, she tells it like this:

There was a girl in Mainz, one Helga Gutenberg, who set out to find a family and got far more than she bargained for. There was a man looking to protect the people who had raised him and saved him, one Godric Gryffindor, who wasn't always right or smart but tried to be both. There was a lonely little girl, one Rowena Rattray, who was too smart for her own good and wanted to see the world beyond her father's estate. There was a boy with a thirst for justice, one Salazar Slytherin, who behind his mask had a soft heart.

There was an organization, the Pure Heart, who searched the countryside for muggle settlements to attack. Lord Rattray, Rowena's father, was one of their leaders and a cruel man. On her tenth birthday, Rowena was betrothed to Didymus Lestrange. That was also the year she met Helga, who was a servant at the Rattray household.

 _(Slave,_ her mind whispers, and she can still feel the runic chains Rattray had carved into her skin as if it had been yesterday. _You were a slave, and Rowena met you because you were her betrothal gift._ That part, she leaves out.)

On the day of her wedding, Helga and Rowena snuck out of the Rattray estate and headed west, towards the woods where Salazar had said he'd meet them. You see, Salazar was Rowena's only friend, and he had gone to Godric to help save the families of people he'd watched die.

(That's an oversimplification on her part; Rowena had heard that Sherwood Forest was a meeting point, to prevent enemies or uncertain allies from figuring out the Hollow's location, from Godric on one of his "visits". "Sherwood," he had whispered into her ear, "when you're ready to fight." Salazar had been their informant on the inside for a while, so it isn't _that_ big of a deal.)

(There's also the fact that neither of them actually went to Sherwood Forest until much later, and their grand escape had as much to do with saving some captured Hollow Men (and, in the process, spiting both her father _and_ supposed-to-behusband) as it had to do with fear of Didymus. Accidents could happen when Rowena was around, little tragedies that could've happened to anyone, and no one would ever blame crazy Rowena for a bit of it; she was smart about people in a way the boys, for all their knowledge of tactics and morale-building, weren't.)

The four became friends in trying to save the others who fought against the Pure Heart, and decided that they needed a safe haven for muggleborn children. They realized the need for safety in obscurity, so they moved to Scotland and built this castle brick by brick, right into the mountainside that they had mined for the stone to build it. As they went, Rowena, who was the best at runes, and Godric, who had the most magical power, put protective wards into every stone they laid. When they were done, Hogwarts was the most heavily warded place in the world.

She stops there; the rest, they know. The rest, they can figure out. The rest, she doesn't want to remember. Typically, this is when they leave.

Sometimes, they ask about the fight against the Pure Heart, and she will tell them the stories of how Godric, Agrona, Robert, Lysander, and Salazar walked into trouble time and again and she, Rowena, and Isolde, occasionally with Henry, had to save them. Some of the boys yell at her for lying when she tells them these, but the girls think they're funny and many Gryffindors embrace their founder being brought low enough to be relatable. Besides, the Unicorn Wrestling Match (not to mention at least three of the times that Godric was captured) were enough to put her in stitches after the adrenaline wore off even while they were at war; they can be funny now.

Sometimes, they ask about the founder's spouses, who've been completely forgotten, and she will tell them of Isolde and Agrona and Robert and Henry. They listen as if enchanted as she writes the half-siren back in, fiery and fierce but oh so loving; they stare in awe as she describes Robert as he was in life - the smart(er) version of Godric who wasn't included in the Founding Story because he had no magic. She watches more than one girl leave the room with stars in her eyes and pick up the sword because of those tales. She sees more than one boy decide that he wants to be Henry - not powerful, not a genius, but steady in any storm - when he's grown.

(Once, a Ravenclaw asks how she got from Mains to Britain after she's had enough firewhiskey to be uninhibited but not enough to be incoherent. She tells her story to a gaggle of seventh years trying to write their research essays on the Founders Four, and she doesn't leave out the cold sea or the biting chains or Rattray's menace or all the other little things she's kept from her children. After that, Cuthbert decides to study Goblin rebellions instead.)

Sometimes, they ask what the founders were like after the founding, and she tells them the stories that keep her up at night. It might relieve the younger ones to not have to live up to gods, but the founders were most human near the end, and the end is not a happy story. Still, she tells them of Rowena forgetting to sleep or eat for weeks at a time while working on projects, of the times her loyalty made her a fool, of how a desire for justice turned Salazar cold, of how Godric's bravery made him reckless and how it led to his demise. She warns them, year after year, that remaking oneself into a person who shows all of their house traits to the neglect of everything else is dangerous, that the characteristics they were sorted by can get them killed if they take it too far. Most of them listen.

She tells her stories until the day she dies, nearly four hundred years of wide-eyed eleven-year-olds from when she started. In her desk drawer, she leaves four journals, spelled to never fade, that tell the whole story of how Hogwarts was founded. She starts at the very beginning, with a little girl in Mainz and two children trapped in lonely old houses that they never called home, with a movement and those brave enough to stand in its way. She includes the good days and bad days alike, because what happened on the bad days made them fight for this place. She writes down how they built Hogwarts, brick by brick. She tells how the Founders died, apart, just as alone as they had started.

Her successor uses them as kindling.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very into history being more complex than it is commonly portrayed. Put this into combination with my love of somewhat-crazy fan theories and the fact that the Founders story is oversimplified, and you get this.
> 
> All the names are at least plausible, with Agrona being a Brittanic goddess of war. Rattray is a Scottish surname meaning "fortress town". Mainz was a city in the tenth century. Sherwood forest is an actual forest near Nottinghamshire and the location of Robin Hood, which was an intentional reference. Basically everything else in this story was made up whole cloth; I'm sorry if I have stumbled into a historical pit trap.
> 
> I am expanding portions of this, but it will end up long and take longer than the exchange period.


End file.
